Incorporating Carbon and Bioenergy Concerns Into Forest Management

The primary focus of this paper is to review articles that incorporate forest carbon sequestration or bioenergy into an optimization framework for forest management at the stand and forest levels and to highlight the gaps in the literature. Forest management is seen as a cost-effective strategy to reduce carbon emission, and optimization techniques are a powerful tool to assist in developing an optimal strategy. Our review of literature shows a gap in research on the use of optimal management schemes to investigate the impact of silvicultural techniques such as site preparation, genetic improvement, and fertilization on carbon sequestration. For operational planning, spatial information is helpful in developing an optimal mitigation strategy. However, there is a gap in literature when it comes to the application of exact solution techniques to solve spatially constrained harvest scheduling problems that encourage carbon sequestration and timber production, while taking into account forest management prescriptions. The review further shows that assessing the impacts of using carbon sequestration and bioenergy strategies to mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas-induced climate change is complex due to the interaction between the forest sector, energy, and other industrial product sectors. We suggest that more research should be directed towards using optimization techniques and an integrated system approach that tracks carbon flow in multiple sectors as a strategy to reduce carbon emissions. This strategy should encourage higher wood utilization and increase use of long-lived harvested wood products as well as bioenergy from waste wood.